They left Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Michigan, and Stanford to drive ambulances on the French front in what was then called the Great War. Arlen Hansen's tale of the American volunteer ambulance drivers of World War I emphasizes the esprit de corps of these well-bred, well-educated men and women, many of whom came seeking adventure and romance only to find carnage on an unprecedented scale. Some were to become literary legends—Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, and Archibald MacLeish, to name a few—but all were part of a generation seeking something greater and grander than what they could find at home.

"At long last the experience of the young Americans who went to Europe as volunteers in World War I has been captured in one book."—MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History